Bossanova For Lunch
by v-volatile
Summary: BobbyAlex. Bossanova quartets in the middle of the day, victims reminding Bobby of his mother, a fascination with Alex's fighting technique. I'm thinking specifically of Dave Brubeck Quartet's song 'Broadway Bossanova' off 'Jazz Impressions of New York'.


**Bossanova For Lunch**

**Paring:** Alex/Bobby  
**Length:** 6101 words  
**Rating:** T  
**A/N:** Not episode-accurate in terms of time or cases; I was constructing my fantasy temporally but the character representation and personality tidbits/some dialogue is very true to the actual show.  
**Disclaimer:** Not mine, they belong to Dick Wolf and the L&O:CI writers, etc.

It was a phenomenon that interested many people: Bobby Goren could get to know someone in a deep psychological way after speaking with them for less than half an hour. In fact it interested the NYPD enough to make him Major Case's prized possession, resulting in generous and highly cooperative treatment by his police boss and the local district attorney's office.

But getting him to _keep_ a partner? Something else entirely. He'd overshadow anyone too quiet in the interrogation room or on the street. He'd become frustrated with someone whose reasoning ability was slower than his. He'd get angry with someone who seemed emotionally or sexually aggressive, but he'd get nowhere with someone whose personality meant constant submission. Bobby went through partner after partner, a frustrating career game of musical chairs. Of course, Deakins got angry when each pairing ended in disaster, but he remained understanding enough to seek out yet another person. When Alex Eames was on her way out of Vice and looking to move up in the world of law enforcement, her reputation for fierce independence, physical strength and intellectual capability preceded her -- right to Deakins' desk. And, like Bobby, she saw valuable connections where other officers didn't. It seemed like it would work out, so he set up a meeting between the two officers, instructing Bobby to 'explain his style', in more words than 'intellect defies evil'.

Neither Alex nor Bobby ever forgot their first meeting.

"I imagined you being taller," Bobby said, his eyes opening wide as Alex sat down across the table from him in the empty interrogation room.

"I imagined you being younger. The way the rumors go, you seemed like some kind of child prodigy. But you're _my _age. Gray hair," she replied, and he watched her eyes move to his temples. She had been wearing a sleeveless shirt that day, a black one with a high neck, tucked into a pair of sturdy grey trousers in very subtle plaid. Leather boots that looked to be for fighting. Alex did not wear skirts.

"While we're on the topic of, uh, misconceptions and rumors, I didn't know you were five two. People seem to be…I think, scared of you? So I wasn't expecting it," he offered, and looked at her arms. He noticed the definition of her shoulders, deltoids and biceps, the sleek muscle along her forearms.

"They're scared of me?" She laughed. "I enjoy self-defense, but I'm not easily provoked. And with your size, I can't imagine it being a problem even if I was," she added. He imagined her drop-kicking hefty male cops on Saturday mornings at the training center's gym, knocking out the Vice boys who had been her backup just a couple nights earlier. He imagined that she was very fast and precise, and that was her advantage.

"I've heard a lot about your interrogation technique. You want to explain that? If we're going to work together, I can't keep relying on rumors," Alex said, then, to break the silence, to distract Bobby from his intense staring. She could tell he was sizing her up, but he was doing it with the blithe disinterest of a doctor. Without the usual subconscious sexual tint.

"I've gone through a lot of partners because of the interrogation practice. You have to work with me – not behind me or ahead of me – because what I do is play on timing."

"I'm not quite sure I understand."

"The timing. It is very important. The details, how things are placed. I'll make something up to get alone with the suspect, I'll lie about my own personal life and ingratiate myself with them and then time the crushing blow of the evidence for when they're feeling strongest. What I do…manipulates suspects, mirrors them, confuses them, intimidates them, throws them off, changes their thought patterns. I make them forget which side they're on," Bobby said, the words coming out in a rush, his eyes moving around the room as he spoke, gesturing emphatically. "I'm sorry; this is…difficult for me to explain abstractly. With practice, I'm sure you will pick up on everything. You'll fall into it," he said, turned his head to the side, "if you don't, that doesn't make either of us worthless. It would just show we work differently."

"I agree. Let's get started, shall we?" Alex said, smiling.

"Good idea. Just, ah, one thing."

"Yes?" She rose to her feet.

"Last names at work, ok?"

"Fine with me, Goren," she said, and smiled at him. They made their way out, ready to thank Deakins for his excellent decision.

After nearly seven months of working alongside one another, the pair finally brought their work home, to Alex's uptown apartment. It was a Friday night. They were working on a case that entailed tsunamis of information, both digital and on paper. Bobby ordered pizza on his way over, and brought his laptop, feeling a little like a high school kid about to start on a group history project. (He was later amazed to see, for the first time, Alex wearing not-career-clothes: sweatpants and two thin cotton t-shirts, the bottom one longer than the other. She didn't have any shoes on.) He had dared only to forgo his tie and jacket, keeping the usual dress pants and designer buttondown. He rolled up his sleeves, then knocked on the door.

"Goren!" She said, opening the door to him. "How are you? Come in."

"You can call me Bobby. We're off work," he said very quietly, watching her pad towards her kitchen.

"I'm sorry?"

"I said, uh, you can call me Bobby. We're off work, right?"

"Oh. Bobby. I'll have to get used to that. Want a drink?" She leaned around the corner of the kitchen door holding two empty glasses.

"Whatever you have." He did not understand whether or not it was ok for him to call her Alex.

"Screwdrivers," she said, arriving at the couch and putting the glasses on the coffee table.

"Thank you," he murmured. "Alex." He ventured.

"You're welcome. Now, let's get to work," she replied, reassuring him that she didn't mind hearing him use her first name. She opened a folder and shuffled the papers. He seated himself to her right and did the same. They began reading. Drinking. Talking about what they were reading. Eating pizza. Drinking more. Looking things up on the computer. Telling stories about past cases they'd been on. Their arms lay against one another as they made notes in the margins of brief after brief with tired hands (his left, her right).

Bobby's eyes strayed to his partner's waist. She had the perfect stomach: training muscles under softness that the t-shirt clung to. He wished he could stand behind her and jump her with a hug, press his hands against those perfect hips.

"So he only slept with vulnerable women," Alex said suddenly into the silence. She was speaking about the suspect, of course, by then slouching down on the couch, her bare feet on the coffee table, her glass empty. "Physically tiny women. This is a repeat, this latest victim." He slipped a hand under the hem of her t-shirt to scratch an itch.

Bobby found this irresistible. _Task at hand, task at hand. TASK AT HAND_, he thought silently.She yawned. He stared. She was like a small, athletic cat.

"Certainly. These women, they're…your size, not that you're not by any means vulnerable," Bobby murmured.

"Thank you. I guess that means I'm not your type, huh?" She joked.

"I don't like vulnerable women."

"What _do_ you like?" Alex asked, grinning, looking up at him from her slouched position, not adding, _you look like you couldn't work up the nerve to approach a woman if your life depended on it._

"Protectors," he replied and looking right down into her eyes, making her suddenly change her mind about this perceived comical hesitancy. The eye contact burned. He had a gentle, rather attractive face, she noticed, the shadowed eyes, the heavy brow, but few wrinkles to complement the graying temples. A perfect mouth. "Ones who stand up for themselves, too," he added and rubbed his eyes, feeling very fatigued. "I'm going to make myself another," he said, picking up the glasses, getting up. "You want one?"

"Yeah. I've had about enough of this," she said, throwing her current reading material onto the floor next to the couch. They had done a lot: the piles now looked very different, and it was after midnight. They'd been at it for hours.

"I'm going to turn on the TV," she called to him in the kitchen.

"I'm not going to stop you," he called back.

Letterman was on. Alex crossed her legs at the bony ankles, slouched some more, grinned at a couple of well-placed political puns. Bobby returned with more drinks.

"Ugh! How much vodka is in this!" She said suddenly, startled at the first sip. "If you drain that bottle, Bobby, you have to buy me another."

"It's not empty. I'm trying to drink us to sleep, Alex. We look like raccoons," Bobby informed her. "Big circles around our eyes from all this work. Drink up."

"I see," Alex replied, laughing for a moment, and obediently took a sip. She set down her drink, looked at him. "You know how I became a cop?"

"How?"

"I was at the beach one summer with some friends, and a man had a heart attack right in front of me. A stranger. He died in the sand. That night I came home for dinner – my parents had guests – and they asked me what I wanted to do with my life, and I told them that I wanted to be a cop. My brother told me I wouldn't have the necessary guts for it later. I told him I had watched a man die. And then I kicked him kind of girlishly. Nonetheless, he went down like a bag of rocks. He never called me a coward again, and a cop I became. I figured that if that man on beach hadn't really had a heart attack, I could figure out why later."

"That's a great story," Bobby replied, his eyes wide now, nursing his drink. "I became a cop because my mother said I spent time noticing everything unimportant when I was little. I always thought the detail was important. I don't know."

"Of course they are," she said, putting hand on his arm. "of course they are. I'm going to bed after Letterman is done. I want to see this band they have playing. You can sleep here, if you like, or go home. Although I think you shouldn't be walking around like that," she said, "it looks like you can't focus your eyes."

_I'm just staring at you_, he wanted to say, and correct her. He remained silent. They watched TV. They had two more drinks. Alex started walking crooked. A band played a song at the end of Letterman. It was a love song, and it gave Bobby a stomachache. He watched as she precariously cleared the glasses and brought him a pillow and a blanket. She walked off down the hallway, one in the morning, pulling one t-shirt over her head in the hall and closing the door behind her.

Protectors.

Witty, beautiful, tiny ones.

Who can take care of themselves.

Who look edible in pajamas.

Who have fighting-prone brothers and tragically dead husbands and a sixth sense for psychological interrogations.

Who complete my sentences.

Who sleep half-naked in the next room.

Bobby brutalized himself with this alcohol-fueled romanticism, as he unbuttoned his now hopelessly wrinkled dress shirt, and buried his head in the pillow, pressing his fingertips into his eyes. The pillow smelled like her on the couch that smelled like her. Under a blanket that smelled like her, he fell into a drunken sleep.

When he woke early the next morning, he felt horrible and dehydrated, but his mind woke him early as always, a biological alarm. He found a pen on the floor and ripped a piece of paper off of a sheet from one of the piles. On it, he wrote 'THANK YOU' in big letters, and signed his name below. Sitting up, he buttoned his shirt, tucked it in, fished his keys out of the couch cushions where they'd fallen and rose to his feet. Walking to Alex's room at the end of the hall, he found her blinds drawn and her body a small half-moon under the covers, one arm thrown onto their surface. He gently uncurled her outstretched hand, pressed the note to her palm, and closed her fingers with his own. She did not wake up, or even move. He let himself out and began his walk to the subway. He felt sick from hunger, emptiness, the growing acid in his stomach from liquor, temptation and lost opportunities. He took himself to a diner where he put away a hangover breakfast, thinking how the next week of work would be a test in loneliness.

It did not happen often, but when it did, it never failed to harrow them: middle of the night crime scenes, the bodies involved as fresh as Deakins' ultra-late calls to their cell phones. Alex and Bobby met late one night, well into their second year of working together, at one of these scenes, prepared for the worst. What they found was worse than they could have prepared for, however, something no one had been willing to describe on the phone. The body of a small child, freshly killed, had been found in a side street between a pair of abandoned harbor warehouses. It was little girl, her clothing cut away from her body, a long, deep incision cut into the right side of her body from her neck to the bones of her right ankle, the skin lifted, cut and pulled back barbarically; this killer had set out to make a very powerful statement. She had been punched repeatedly in the mouth and her whole body had bled out heavily, onto the concrete. The muscle tissue in her shoulder, belly and legs was visible.

Alex got there first.

"You eaten recently, Eames?" Deakins asked, looking remarkably deathlike. He was pale, but burning with anger.

"No, sir," she replied, and felt her stomach and lungs tighten at his statement.

"Well, I hope to God not," he replied, ushering her past tapelines and scuttling forensic scientists into the heart of the crime scene, "because this is one of the worst I've ever seen."

When she saw the little girl, gutted like a fish, her first response was tearful rage, the usual disgust; this was quickly replaced by weakness and nausea, something she had never before let herself succumb to on the scene of a murder. She backpedaled, into the brick of a nearby building, wheeling around, catching herself with her palms on the wall before getting to her knees and retching violently. She used one arm to brace herself and one arm to wipe her face, wet with nervous sweat and tears. _Thank God Bobby isn't here yet, _she thought. _This is the last thing he needs to see me doing._ When she finally felt capable, she got up and turned around. Her hands and arms shook, but she began examining the perimeter in a business frame of mind, looking for forgotten details with Bobby's eye. A few minutes later, he arrived. She was leaning against a cruiser, making a note, when he walked up to her, touched her forearm.

"Good morning."

"Good?"

"Did you already have a look?"

"Unfortunately, yes."

"How bad?"

"Very. Watch yourself," she said, and followed behind his tall form as he approached the girl's body.

"Alex," he said, _her first name in front of other officers, her first name in the middle of work,_ and that's when she knew it: he would be overcome. Just as she had been. For her it was expected; she had the sickeningly panicked feelings every time she was faced with another killing, and even if she buried them away from the eyes of her fellow officers, she was used to feeling them. But she'd quite believed that Bobby even _had_ them. She imagined his impersonal stare, which he used on all things and all people, to be true to the core. "ALEX." He bit the word out violently. Her first name and the other officers' eyes on him but he didn't see them. He reached behind himself and gripped her arm tightly with his big elegant hand. Suddenly he let go and bolted, stumbled quickly onto the sidewalk, towards the back of one of the buildings, towards someplace where no one could see him. She followed, about to call out, then cutting herself off at the last minute before she yelled his first name and made it worse. She found him on the crumbling concrete steps of the truck dock behind the building. He was kneeling awkwardly over the precipice of the staircase, four steps up, holding onto a scrap of metal railing with one hand, vomiting and coughing alternately.

Alex came up behind him, moved her hand on his lower back in circles.

"You gonna be alright?" She whispered into his ear.

"_Christ Almighty_," Bobby moaned, inching back on his knees and curling down onto himself, pressing his forehead to his hands, palms-up on the concrete surface beneath him. The intensity of his voice increased suddenly. A whispered shout: "Her face, her hair. SHE LOOKS LIKE MY MOTHER DID AT THAT AGE."

"Bobby," Alex said, moving next to him, curling her arm around his waist. "Relax. Start breathing again. I got sick too. Relax." She held him without really understanding she was doing it. A child with nightmares. "Take your time, no one can see you back here. Relax."

"God."

"Easy," Alex said, as he sat up, shaking, unsure of himself.

"I don't do this. This doesn't happen." He rubbed his face with his hands. "I can control my response. She looked like my mother. He didn't say what happened," Bobby muttered angrily, referring to Deakins' cryptic telephone message. He spat over the side of the steps and wiped his mouth with his handkerchief. He sat up, moved aside, leaned against the wall, causing Alex to sit next to him.

"Thank you," he mumbled. "For…tolerating this. I can't imagine you know what to do with me, now."

"Don't underestimate me, Bobby. I babysat more than a few sick kids in my adolescence. You feel ok? Stomach empty?"

"I think so." His mind suddenly registered two things: her arm around his waist and his mistake with her name. "I'm sorry I called you Alex back there. It's what my mind got to first."

"It's alright. I don't think saying it in public once will hurt anyone."

She moved her hand up to the back of his neck. He felt this movement, and the cool touch of her palm, making his nausea subside. They sat for a few moments in silence. When she moved her hand of her own accord, he rose to his feet.

"Let's do something about this."

They returned to the crime scene, and began the investigation.

Their second year as partners ended that winter, bringing with it the psychologically exhausting conclusion to the case involved the gutted little girl. In the last days of it Bobby began coming in on two or three hours of sleep, frustrating Deakins with mumbling, circular answers and frustrating Alex with his complete lack of energy. They finished witnessing in court on a Friday, and Deakins came screaming to their desks that afternoon telling Bobby to take the next three days off for sleep and recovery.

"I _cannot _have you work on cases when you are too strung out to communicate with your partner, your superiors, and your interviewees. Goren, no matter how much you love this job, you are _not_ going to break your body doing it. I don't want to see you till Tuesday morning."

"Sir?" Alex had asked, surprised at the outburst, unsure of her orders.

"You either, for Christ's sake!" Deakins had yelled, and returned to his office.

They went home that night to their respective apartments. Bobby suffered a few hours of insomnia, then conked out on the couch when late night TV lulled him to sleep. Alex called her sister, talked for a little while, then fell asleep herself for a good thirteen hours. She had nightmares, about her initial experience seeing the girl's body; they had spent the whole day talking about the case and listening to other people talk about the case in court.

So when her phone rang the next afternoon, she didn't expect it to be Bobby. She thought perhaps it was a friend in the city or her sister, even a sales call.

"Hello?"

"Alex?"

The last thing she had expected.

"You want to get some lunch?"

"Are you asking me to work on my weekend off?"

"No, I'm, uh, asking you to eat lunch with me on your weekend off."

"That's a little more reasonable. Where were you thinking?"

"Bossanova for lunch," Bobby said, and Alex could hear the smile in his voice.

They went to a little dive bar-restaurant in the basement of an apartment building in the Village. A jazz quartet crammed against the black wall played scratchy bossanova, music more suited to a hot foreign night than to the blustery Manhattan Saturday at hand. They sat halfway up the room away from the band at a tiny card table originally set for three. A waitress so black she almost gleamed blue greeted them, handed them big glasses of water, gathered up the extra settings and pulled out her notepad.

"You want what you get last week, honey?" She said to Bobby in her African lilt, and he nodded. Alex noticed his shirt, grey broadcloth, was untucked. This was something new. She felt too boring for the room with her hooded sweater.

"I'll have the same," Alex quickly interjected, sensing she might look stupid asking for a menu. She met Bobby's eyes for a moment. He enjoyed any opportunity for gratuitous eye contact, because the only time he could get away with staring at her eyes was when she decided to stare at his.

The waitress walked away from the their table, toward the kitchen. Alex looked round, noticing that the only other people in the restaurant were black grandfather-type men and a few Hispanic-looking middle-aged couples.

"You come here a lot?" Alex asked him.

"Yeah. I like it here. You see the bass player?" Alex followed the angle of his hand with her eyes. The bass player, his instrument up against the drum set, plucked away with a big glossy grin on his face. "He's blind."

"Really? You asked him?"

"No…he never looks at his hands. Upright bass you've got to look at your hands, uh, it's instinctual, if only from the way the instrument is set up. He keeps his eyes on the ceiling all day."

"You never stop solving, even at night, do you." Alex murmured, a statement, not a question. "What are we eating, by the way?"

"Curried chicken, yellow rice, plantains."

"What are plantains like?"

"Really _good_ bananas, fried," Bobby said, which made Alex smile.

"How did you find this place?"

"I was walking around at night and the band was back there whooping and yelling, playing loud, so I came in and they started feeding me and I kept coming back," Bobby replied, his eyes moving everywhere in the room except on Alex.

"Why am I here, Bobby?"

"Because I wanted to eat lunch with someone."

"'Someone'. Oh, come on. I mean, why am I _really _here? Is there something I should know that you aren't telling me?"

"Working with you is like having my mind read. Do you understand how much of a _relief _that is? I don't have to drag you through the reasoning like I have to with Deakins, with the ADA, with suspects. You keep getting it. You see all the subtleties, you can fight, you can argue, you're even better at driving than I am. Can you just let me buy you lunch in thanks?"

"Ok, ok. I was just confused. Thank you. I'm sorry. Thank you. I didn't know you thought all that," Alex replied, her hands flying up in an involuntary gesture of assent.

"Excellent," Bobby said very quietly, slumping in his chair and tapping his fingertips with the music on the table. What he didn't say was, you're wonderful to work with and wonderful to look at and wonderful to talk to and I can't remember the last time a woman tolerated me with so much kindness and patience.

He thought it was better not to be overwhelming.

Alex watched him as they listened to the music for a little while, and then slowly ate their food, gulping down ice water and eating spoonfuls of plain yogurt to dull the vicious burn of the curry. If he had a girlfriend, she thought, her eyes following his gentle hands from napkin to fork to glass, she would be the best-taken-care-of girlfriend in this whole fucking city. He'd look after her exactly how he didn't get looked after when he was little. She'd only be miserable if she made it that way herself. He looked shorter and far less imposing in his flimsy chair in the dim room, without the tie, with his coat off. The darkness made them both appear younger.

Alex stopped herself just in time from reaching across the table and taking his hand in hers. The quartet stopped, to joke and talk and drink their whiskey sodas. The blind bassist disappeared out back, presumably for a smoke. She heard their waitress' big wave of a laugh echo from the kitchen. The plates were scraped mostly empty, and Bobby was counting bills onto the table, one pile for the food and one for the tip, which was sizeable.

"Let's go," he said, rising to his feet and carefully pushing the chair towards the laden card table. Alex followed suit and they escaped into the dark, windy afternoon, putting on coats that looked like abbreviated versions of the ones they wore to work.

Pedestrian traffic swirled around them. They walked to the train, talked idly while they sat next to one another on their way uptown. When Alex was finally within reasonable walking distance of her apartment, they paused on the corner, out of the way of people walking past them. Alex assumed Bobby would just wish her a good weekend and head off in whichever direction, as he usually.

Instead, he took her arm, leaned down and kissed her firmly on the cheek.

It was a lot like licking her finger and touching a half-wired electrical outlet. Very startling, tingly, definitely memorable. Almost instinctually and before he could move away, Alex reached up, put her hand on his neck and kissed him quickly on the mouth.

"Alex-" he said, just as the weight of situation fully hit her.

"It's okay," she muttered quickly, cutting him off and immediately bolting in the direction of her building, before there could be any muddled conversation. She touched her cheek, looked back over her shoulder as she strode away. He was standing in the same place, mouth slightly open, watching her.

_That felt _good. _I'm going to get myself fired, _she thought. _I'm going to ruin his career and mine._ Walking home as fast she could without actually running, she made a mental promise to steer clear of Bobby until Monday.

Alex was not, by nature of her situation, a very reflective person. There was no time to reflect extensively on life decisions when you were chasing down killers early in the morning and late into the night. Sometimes it was all she could do to get through the basics in addition to the taxing job of being a high-ranked Major Case detective.

But she found herself reflecting obsessively that weekend, her mind running an extra track, thinking about Bobby kissing her. The track ran at all conscious hours, as she cleaned her apartment and did her laundry and grocery shopped and paid the bills and washed the dishes and visited her sister, doing every boring domestic task she could think of.

It really wasn't going to work, was it?

No matter what happened?

Monday came and came to a close; she went to bed at nine that night after nodding off in front of the TV trying to watch a movie.

Figures, that the first person she took a liking to since her husband died was her _partner._ And possibly one of the most enigmatic people she had ever met. She had no idea what he was really thinking, but she had caught him staring at her so many times, and dismissed it as his being lost in thought. And apparently he really had been looking at her. She imagined him at the restaurant they'd eaten at, watching the band with the gleaming bar and velvet wallpaper as his background.

The next morning, Deakins sent them out to interview some people in south Bronx for a newly re-opened homicide another precinct had handed over to them after being overwhelmed. They got into the elevator, half past eight, Bobby chewing what appeared to be gumballs from a bag in his pocket to chase the taste of coffee. The doors closed and Bobby took a break and turned to Alex.

"I'm…sorry. I didn't mean to make anything worse." Alex wanted to ask him, how do you mean worse? What was bad in the first place?

"Me either," she whispered instead. He blew a purple bubble a few inches wide and let it pop with a snap. The air smelled of synthetic grape. Alex looked at her shoes, knowing she might say something else stupid if she looked up.

When they finally made it to the Bronx, they started up the stairs in one of the housing projects, searching for someone who they suspected had witnessed the homicide's prime suspect get a hold of his weapon. They opened the door on some kid with his back to them, moving something around in his hands. He turned, caught a glimpse of the visitors, shouted something unintelligible, and lunged at Alex with the speed of a track star. He arrived before she could react, trying to clear a path of escape to the stairs, clotheslining her in the stomach, slamming her back against the wall and finally catching her on the mouth with a punch. A moment later the door had slammed open and he was gone.

Suddenly Bobby was at Alex's side, a hand at her waist and a hand on her cheek, turning her head gently to look where the punch had landed.

"You ok?"

"Gor- Bobby…"

"Your lip's bleeding."

"I'm fine," she mumbled around her cut lip, taking his free hand with her own. "I'm not sure you are, but I am." She wiped her mouth and saw blood on her hand.

"Scared the hell out of me," he murmured, giving her his handkerchief, which she pressed against her mouth. "You've got to have bruises from that impact." He half-knelt before her as if he expected her to flinch suddenly. He reached up and put his free hand over hers as she held the cloth to her bleeding lip.

Because she could not kiss him, she leaned down and rested her forehead on his shoulder instead. He knelt a little lower and held her shoulder. She stayed still for a long moment. The message had been sent. The hallway was blessedly empty. When she stood up, he kissed her on the cheek again, this time without hesitation, possessively and protectively. She took a step for ward and stood against him, feeling an ache grow in her stomach with the realization of the direction they were headed in.

They stood in the hallway, half-holding each other in silence.

"You can always tell me to stop this," Bobby said very quietly. "It would be hard for me, because, I care about you, but, you can always tell me to stop, and I'll leave you alone." His voice rose in fell with that familiar cadence she'd never heard come out of anyone else's mouth.

Alex shook her head emphatically, and bled into his handkerchief.

They did eventually find the woman they were looking for. They eventually interviewed her, too, and she gave them a couple of important pieces of information, making the drive to the south Bronx and the fight somewhat worth it. Alex's lip healed, leaving a little pale scar that she put Neosporin on twice daily. They worked doggedly, early to late as usual. Bobby somehow looked less tired, like he looked forward to work more and more. They met at one another's apartments to work on the case every now and then; it ended always in a replay of the cautious contact of the weekend Bobby took Alex to hear bossanova in the Village. Neither Alex nor Bobby was courageous enough to go further and set off something uncontrollable that might consume both their hearts and careers.

Bobby never drank in front of Alex again. He didn't want to let down his defenses, terrified of doing something wrong.

At the Major Case New Year's party, Deakins danced with his wife, Logan danced with his girlfriend, and Bobby (sober) danced with Alex (sober). They went home alone.

Alex was beginning to get tired of waiting around.

Bobby was beginning to wonder if he had made a terrible mistake.

So, when Alex showed up at his door one Friday night a month later (wearing faded jeans and an NYPD sweatshirt, looking more like a college student than his partner) grabbed him by the collar, and kissed the hell out of him, he was rather surprised.

"What are you doing?" He asked. She kicked the door shut behind her.

"Can't take my mind off of you," she mumbled in reply and kissed him again. He was now leaning down voluntarily, holding her face in his hands.

"Are you sure about this?"

"Yes."

"Me too," Bobby replied, his smile wide and natural. He picked Alex clear up off her feet in one smooth movement.

"Hey!"

"What?" He asked her, laughing, as she put her arms around his neck and kissed him below the ear.

"You don't have to carry me. I can walk."

"I know, but I like this better," he answered, grinning, as he carried her to his room.

He woke up the next morning and rolled over to see that not only was the afternoon a measly hour away, but Alex was naked and wrapped in his sheets right next to him, reading a book he'd left on his bedside with a furrowed brow. She looked over.

"You're up," she murmured.

"Not quite yet."

"I was being quiet, I think you needed the sleep."

"I did. You like that book?" He asked her, speaking very quietly as if any noise would make the vision of her vanish.

"It's good. How do you feel?" Bobby rolled over and stretched, yawning, then rolled back and faced her.

"Loved. Come on, you can read later," he prompted, reaching for her waist under the blankets, making her yelp and squirm deliciously. On his face was one of the smiles he usually employed when he just got a joke no one else in the room even noticed was there. Alex felt warmed head to toe by it, there at close range.

"Loved, huh?" She asked him, once she was again alongside him on his side of the bed. "You didn't expect me to ever show up here, did you? Or at least not because of _this_."

"I didn't. I'm not usually good at these things."

"I beg to differ."

"That's what I like about you."

"Can you keep a secret, Bobby? Because I really, really, like my job, and somehow I can see Deakins not being happy about this," Alex said, her voice suddenly turning serious, speaking into Bobby's collarbone. "And it doesn't show many signs of stopping."

"I know, I know. I'm not going to let on, even if you do. People might laugh at us; we _are_ partners. And no doubt Deakins and the rest of management would have objections."

"So we just don't let them find out?"

"That's the plan." Bobby jumped as Alex slid atop him, kneeling astride his stomach and bending down to kiss him.

"Fine with me."


End file.
